Growing Wires In Water

moooooooo writes: "Australia's ABC is reporting that U.S. researchers have discovered a new way to grow microscopic electrical wires in water, and soon hope to be plugging into living cells. Kevin D. Hermanson and colleagues from the University of Delaware created self-assembling, self- repairing conductive wires -- a micrometre in diameter and 5 mm in length -- by suspending gold particles in water between two electrodes."

Comments

Diffusion limited aggregation?

[HorsePunchKid]

It'd be nice to see some more background; in particular what inspired them to try this. It sounds like just basic DLA. You use the EM field between the carbon "islands", then the conductive particles in suspended in the liquid move along the field lines in a somewhat Brownian manner (i.e. random, but statstically biased because of the field). Then just set it up so the particles stick to eachother. I wrote (and no doubt many others have, too) a program to simulate this. You can set up groups of attractors that follow different physical laws (e.g. inverse-square, linear, exponential), then set up particle sources (e.g. ambient sources, point sources, linear, circular, etc.). Hit "start", and you see the particles very slowly (i.e. hundreds of thousands of particles) build up into these dendritic structures. It's cool to see somebody actually doing physical work applying the theory, though.